Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days (2010) (PC) (IO Interactive)
4Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days is yet another title on my growing list of Steam summer sale purchases. American- or European-developed games which attempt to realistically represent non-Western environments are few and far between, and arguably the most compelling aspect of IO Interactive's gratuitously violent third-person shooter is its meticulous recreation of the mob turfs and seedy back alleys of Shanghai, the most populous city in China. The sweat shops, rundown apartment buildings and little neon-suffused stores all have an uncommon, sometimes depressing authenticity to them which makes KL2 a more memorable experience than the basic gameplay mechanics would seem to indicate.
The actual shooter controls feel somewhat loose and weightless and the cover system is far from perfect, but what KL2 lacks in precision and polish it makes up for (to some extent, anyway) with breakneck pacing and unusually challenging grunt combat. A single enemy with guns ablazing can be more than enough to finish off protagonist Kane even on Normal difficulty, and this combined with the generally shoddy quality of the firearms in the game increases the importance of not getting flanked and to avoid backing yourself into a corner from where there's no escape route.
Much has been made of the unusual visual style of KL2, but the wobbly camcorder-esque aesthetics are fairly inconsequential once you get used to them. However, there is a chilly crispness to these "digitalized" graphics which thankfully enhances the sense of place and realistic feel of the environments rather than, say, obscure them in layers of grainy post-processing as one might perhaps have feared.